We’re in Monaco. We’ll be touring Eze village and Monaco Rock today. We left Rome on the 3rd and stopped in Livorno yesterday, however, we never got off the ship, so there is nothing to report on Livorno. We used yesterday to relax and catch up. The kids spent probably 7-8 total hours in the kids centre, which was awesome and they loved it. They didn’t want to leave, they even wanted to sleep there. That was an unexpected perk of the ship. We had no idea that the kid center was that good or that you could leave your kids there while on excursions or while at dinner, breakfast or lunch. A definite perk and while I wouldn’t use it all the time, it’s nice to use it sometimes. I spent the day kidless – reading, working out and relaxing.
Rome was meh, not a fan. It’s kind of a shit hole. We ended up staying at an Airbnb that was a distance away from the city center but we found a cool neighborhood in walking distance that we spent most of our time at. We didn’t find that neighborhood until after NYE and we never went out for NYE because it was below 0 temperatures and we were tired. Plus, we had no idea where we were in Rome and all around us was a complete ghost town. We heard the bus took 45 min so we just ditched out on the idea and watched “A Midnight in Paris” and drank GTs instead. The next day we went into town and were accosted non-stop by those street vendors that try to sell you magic bouncing balls and now “selfie sticks”. I’m not kidding there has to be hundreds of these guys in the Colosseum area alone. Every few feet you’re nearly hit by these guys pointing their shitty sticks at you. Ash was about 2 inches from one hitting her in the eye. It’s unpleasant. Rome is unpleasant. Graffiti is everywhere and you know what they say “A city gets the graffiti it deserves”. I think that fits Rome. Don’t want to come back. I’ve spent probably 15 full days here on various trips and I’ve never liked it. Venice is the same. Probably the only two cities I’d call shit holes.
Yesterday, I bought a book called Dual Momentum that won best investing book of the year. I’ve been reading a lot about momentum trading (maybe it should be called rotational investing?) lately (Faber etc) and am convinced of its merits. Though the returns are only slightly higher on a per annum basis (expect 15-17% per annum) the reduced risk, compounding benefits and drastically reduced drawdowns make it epically better. We’re using some momentum in our portfolio constructions. The key is removing large draw downs and with that you can compound year over year so much more efficiently. We’ll be rotating the best 3 out of a set of 15 ETFs on a monthly basis with our momentum strategy. Our Protector Alpha portfolio also has momentum built into its mechanism.
Trading is going OK, I am trying to get all the trades entered for the month of January but had a bit of an issue with IB on Friday when I tried to enter them at open. I had delayed quotes (no idea why, some sort of bug) and couldn’t update the settings in the IB account center because it was ALSO down for a few hours. Essentially I was flying blind and the market moved a bunch (down). I couldn’t see pricing and I got on the ringer with IB but by the time that was all corrected, the market fell a solid 1%. I had opportunity to get way better pricing on some insurance rolls that I missed out on. I also had some better pricing on TLT that I missed out on. I would have entered all of those at market open but this prevented me from doing so. Ah well. It cost a bit but it is part of the business. IB account manager being down was out of my control. Though, I doubt there is any lasting loss as I’ll enter the rest on a slight up day and I rolled to even lower strikes. I mean, I did do some market orders just didn’t get everything. Either way, history shows that there is little difference to the day you enter (1st day of the month or 8th) so I am not so worried about the TLT and bond purchase miss but I am annoyed by the Rolls. It’ll probably end up being net zero (or a small loss) but still quite annoying.
At the time of this writing, the ES futures are quite volatile, they’re up right now but had reached about 2037 before rebounding to 2048. Shanghai index surged to five year highs which seems to have caused the bounce. Good data in China.
Right that’s it! Next time you are coming to Rome with me.
You obviously seem to have a knack for finding the armpit of Rome when there. Plus sometimes it really does pay to stay somewhere central so everything in on your doorstep.
Mission for 2015; Make you love Rome as if it were the best plate of vegan food you’ve ever had!